


Shore of moss

by laughingpineapple



Category: Strandbeest - Theo Jansen, Undisclosed Fandom
Genre: ...windy, Gen, Non-human POV, Travel, Worldbuilding, but mostly: windy.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28057914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: A land wind blows.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Shore of moss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melannen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/gifts).



A bad season’s falling over the shore.

Strandbeesten know the weather, they’ve got wind in their muscles, wind in their sails, wind in their neurons pumping thoughts of streams of air in motion. When the first gust turns, packs of bruchī flee across the coast with their sails spread out and the rest of their sinuous bodies following behind in rippling motions, banded together to traverse the endless sands, fleeing the storm toward calmer gulfs.

Today, when the sun’s still high and the day still puts up a pretense of a salty breeze, they know deep in their hollow bones that there is no escape, not from this one. There is no avoiding this strange new wind that is slowly shifting toward the sea. The shore’s population (hulled mimicrae, scores of uminami, swift daring mulus and their brethren: the humble animaris bruchum in all its permutations) slithers and crawls to what safety it can find. The huge black boulders that litter the beach are crowded already, strandbeesten huddled behind the windbreak, some stragglers even in front of it, accepting the risk of breaking a mast or a leg against the stone just to get any safety net between themselves and the sea. There is no refuge there. The bruchī keep moving, sails wide open, until safety, or until the wind’s at beam-reach and all hope is lost. An old animaris omnia, hulking thing that it is, front claw hammered deep into the sand as an unshakable anchor, lashes its proboscis angrily as a warning to any smaller creature who may dare to rest in the cover of its wide arms. Keep moving.

A bruchum breaks away from the pack to hide behind the carcass of colossal percipiere excelsus, monument to the Fall, the wonder of the old world before the bruchum’s kind conquered the sand. The tattered remains of its sails still flap against the darkening sky, conveying wind into valves and tubes to rows of broken, slashed, cracked stomachs and back into the evening air.

The bruchum uses what little wind its own stomach has gathered to wriggle itself in the nape of the old giant’s legs as a manner of protection. It is a bet. It will have to do. The bruchum waits, small inside the wondrous frame of the percipiere, smaller still against the unending beauty of the coast.

By nightfall, the wind pushes the whole shore toward the sea. Waves fall back, as if dreading the water’s edge, or cradling the bodies of those strandbeesten who did not reach a shelter in time. One of the last probosces met its end today. As its ligaments fall apart and saltwater fills its stomachs, it rejoins a long-lost partner in the ocean’s depths. One day, the sea will carry their bones back to the shore, linked together once more. This sand is filled with fossils.

Biding its time inside the giant’s legs, the bruchum does not know what today’s strange wind has left on the cloth of its sails. Strandbeesten no not see nor hear, all they know is themselves, air currents and sand tracks, and the constant threat of water at the edge of their life. They cannot know petals, won’t ever conceive the furthest remote idea of the color red. This unnamed thing is soft as it slips down the sails and caresses the bruchum’s blunt snout, and fills its lung with a fragrance that is astonishingly, inconceivably not brine.

Imagine such a world. Not “flowers”, no “red blossoms” nor “fresh spring leaves”, that’s all too alien still. Simply imagine a world away from the shore, dizzying though the thought may be, a world sustained by wind but containing no sand, and instead of sand, soft things that smell like not-brine. Imagine, as the night deepens and then gives way to the dawn.

One day, in the slow turning of the years, an opposite wind will blow. The bruchum will wait for that day and, feeling it approach, as strandbeesten do, it will not seek shelter. It will unfurl its sails and open them wide, letting that wind take it past the sand and onto a path of rocks. It will be a steep ascent for the short segments of its body, but it will cross and it will not falter, and there may be corpses of bigger strandbeesten who will have long since attempted this climb and fallen on their fragile feet, or there may not and it will have been the first. Past the path of rocks, the bruchum will be embraced by a dark, damp air that it will not know to call a forest and it will slither under the shadow of trees it cannot see until that wind of miracles dies down. It will lay there, then, crests flapping to the breeze to feed stomach and synapses, until it’s covered in moss, innards in bloom, every tube filled with that deliriously beautiful smell.


End file.
